After Jenny had left with her parents (who had patiently waited in their car outside after finishing their chores), der Brucer and I wandered around trying to find the Drama Book Shop. Jenny and family had thought they knew the block; they had only sent us south by one. Still, I broke down and asked for directions at one of the hotels; better than not finding the place at all.
Der Brucer was mainly to blame for our CD selections earlier at Virgin. (Extra bargains were found on Wonderful Town and Sherry. He also picked up the Jacques Brel revival, a Peter Allen best of, and Harold Arlen's Saratoga, about which I know very little.) At the bookstore, however, he can only be blamed for finding The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (or "How to write pretentious essays on the theater and still leave them tapping their toes"), and Words at War, about the days of the blacklist and it's effects on radio.
For my own raid on the bookstore, the results give us a longer list. The New American Musical is an anthology including the books for Floyd Collins, Rent, Parade, and La Chuisa's Wild Party. Single volumes included the books for Urinetown and Weird Romance (the latter to replace what he'd loaned out before), and scripts for I Am My Own Wife, Take Me Out, Proof, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, and The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?
There is something engaging about reading plays. It relates back to Marshal McLuhan, in some ways, about his theories on cool and hot media. Watching a play is hot: the audience is directly involved with that performance. Watching a film or listening to a recording is cool: the performance exists unchanging without the audience's participation, and will not change even if the watcher or listener never bothers to watch or listen.
Books tend to be cool. They will continue to exist in print, no matter who reads them, and they do not change from one reader to the next. The same can be said of plays, of course, but there is a vital difference in that they demand of the reader an investment of imagination that is far greater than is demanded by a novel or news story. The reader has to construct the theater in his mind, build the sets, light them, cast the actors, costume them, put them through their paces. These aren't just words, they are instructions for a performance, whether that performance takes place in an acutal theater or the virtual theater of the mind.
Some plays and playwrights give explicit instructions when it comes to sets and staging. Some, like Wright's I Am My Own Wife, include prefaces that don't really have to be read by the audience, but inform the reader of other things that matter to the play that the presenter had better know first if the play is to be staged properly. G. B. Shaw did this a lot; some of his prefaces are better than the plays they accompany.
Some plays, like Greenberg's Take Me Out, give little instruction other than entrances and exits, who says what...except for significant moments. There is a much commented-upon monologue, spoken by Mason, on the metaphors of baseball. In the published script, it starts on page 35 and runs though to page 38, ending with the line "That's baseball." Then Greenberg continues with stage directions:
Darren takes his excellent batting stance. Signals to someone located audience-ward to throw a ball. He swings. The swing is beautiful. It connects, there is that lovely sound. DARREN and MASON watch the ball soar. A moment.
DARREN (casually) Baseball.
MASON (happily) Yes. That is, too.
End quote. But read it again, the choice of words. "Excellent batting stance...swing is beautiful...that lovely sound." I know what Greenberg is telling us, I can see it without even closing my eyes.
With musicals, having the score (and knowing how to read music) helps a great deal. Lacking the ability to read music, a flaw most of us have, including some musicians, having a recording available is the next best alternative. There's a reason we associate musicals with their composers over their lyricists, and almost never with their book writers: most people cannot imagine what a melody sounds like without having heard it first, which makes the composer's contribution that much more demanding of our attention.
But there are other things to a musical than the score, the same things to be imagined from any script. This is why I hold recordings and scripts to be so important. With these things, the theater can exist any place I choose to be, as long as my imagination has just enough direction with which to work. And I know I am not alone. Theater buffs are to be found everywhere in the world, some in sections of our planet where no theater ever has been or will be built.
Physically built, that is. The virtual theater is everywhere.